If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

The “our” Hicklin refers to is the gay community. He wrote this review for the gay publication, The Advocate. This is not a message his audience wants to hear.

This message, however, has been obvious to anyone paying attention to this case. Although Hollywood would turn out at least three TV movies about the “crucifixion” of Shepard, two of which premiered in the week before Easter 2002, the homophobic story line never matched the Wyoming reality.

As the truth began to eke out of Laramie, that line grew more and more suspect. Best evidence has always suggested that McKinney, the actual killer, had previously expressed no homophobic sentiments.

One good reason why is that he was an active bisexual himself. Apparently, he and Shepard, who had a known drug problem, had done meth together a number of times. Jiminez contends that Shepard not only used meth but that he may also have dealt it. In addition, he and McKinney apparently had sex together as well.

On the night in question, McKinney went on a meth-fueled rampage. He pistol-whipped the vulnerable Shepard for drug money, drove into town to rob Shepard’s apartment, and then pistol whipped a stranger who got in his way, fracturing his skull in the process.....

.....Of course, McKinney and Henderson were not products of Christian culture, but of its antithesis: a crude, soulless, fatherless, sexually libertine, drug-addled, pop culture. Those who controlled the narrative, however, could shape it as they saw fit......

...By several accounts, McKinney had been on a meth bender for five days prior to the murder, and spent much of October 6 trying to find more drugs. By the evening he was so wound up that he attacked three other men in addition to Shepard. Even Cal Rerucha, the prosecutor who had pushed for the death sentence for McKinney and Henderson, would later concede on ABC’s 20/20 that “it was a murder that was driven by drugs.”
No one was talking much about meth abuse in 1998, though it was rapidly establishing itself in small-town America, as well as in metropolitan gay clubs, where it would leave a catastrophic legacy. In Wyoming in the late 1990s, eighth graders were using meth at a higher rate than 12th graders nationwide. It’s hardly surprising to learn from Jimenez that Shepard was also a routine drug user, and — according to some of his friends — an experienced dealer. (Although there is no real evidence for supposing that Shepard was using drugs himself on the night of his murder).

Despite the many interviews, Jimenez does not entirely resolve the true nature of McKinney’s relationship to Shepard, partly because of his unreliable chief witness. McKinney presents himself as a “straight hustler” turning tricks for money or drugs, but others characterize him as bisexual. A former lover of Shepard’s confirms that Shepard and McKinney had sex while doing drugs in the back of a limo owned by a shady Laramie figure, Doc O’Connor. Another subject, Elaine Baker, tells Jimenez that Shepard and McKinney were friends who had been in sexual threesome with O’Connor. A manager of a gay bar in Denver recalls seeing photos of McKinney and Henderson in the papers and recognizing them as patrons of his bar. He recounts his shock at realizing “these guys who killed that kid came from inside our own community.”

Not everyone is interested in hearing these alternative theories. When 20/20 engaged Jimenez to work on a segment revisiting the case in 2004, GLAAD bridled at what the organization saw as an attempt to undermine the notion that anti-gay bias was a factor; Moises Kaufman, the director and co-writer of The Laramie Project, denounced it as “terrible journalism,” though the segment went on to win an award from the Writers Guild of America for best news analysis of the year.

There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness. In his book, Flagrant Conduct, Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, similarly unpicks the notorious case of Lawrence v. Texas, in which the arrest of two men for having sex in their own bedroom became a vehicle for affirming the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private. Except that the two men were not having sex, and were not even a couple. Yet this non-story, carefully edited and taken all the way to the Supreme Court, changed America.

In different ways, the Shepard story we’ve come to embrace was just as necessary for shaping the history of gay rights as Lawrence v. Texas; it galvanized a generation of LGBT youth and stung lawmakers into action. President Obama, who signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named for Shepard and James Byrd Jr., into law on October 28, 2009, credited Judy Shepard for making him “passionate” about LGBT equality.

There are obvious reasons why advocates of hate crime legislation must want to preserve one particular version of the Matthew Shepard story, but it was always just that — a version. Jimenez’s version is another, more studiously reported account, but he is not the first to challenge the popular mythology. Way back in 1999, Wypijewski rejected what she called the “quasi-religious characterizations of Matthew’s passion, death, and resurrection as patron saint of hate-crime legislation” in favor of what she called “wussitude” — a culture of “compulsory heterosexuality” that teaches young men how to pass as men, unfeeling, benumbed, primed to cloak any vulnerability in violence.

It was Wypijewski, too, who wondered if Price — the star witness — simply thought she was helping out her boyfriend when she told the press that he and Henderson “just wanted to beat [Shepard] up bad enough to teach him a lesson not to come on to straight people.” If you thought gay panic was a better defense than a drug-fueled rampage, wouldn’t you, perhaps, go with it?

Jimenez is less interested in that kind of social analysis, but what’s striking throughout his book is how desperate McKinney is to refute allegations that he is gay or bisexual — even at the expense of undermining his own case. Whether it was a hate crime, a drug crime, or a combination of the two, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that self-hate and a misguided culture of masculinity, which taught McKinney to abhor in himself what Shepard had learned to embrace, was as complicit as anything else in the murder of Matthew Shepard.

That is, of course, a kind of hate crime — just not as straightforward as the one we’ve embraced all these years....

...Much of what we know about Lawrence v. Texas proves, in Carpenter’s persuasive telling, to be untrue. What we know, or thought we knew, is this: on the evening of September 17, 1998, at a dingy, blue-collar apartment complex outside Houston, four sheriff’s deputies responded “to a report of ‘a black male going crazy with a gun.’ ” What they found, on entering the apartment of John Lawrence, was almost certainly not what even the most knowledgeable gay-rights advocates believe to this day. There was indeed a black man in the apartment—Tyron Garner—although he had no gun. But just what, exactly, were he and Lawrence doing at the time of their arrest? Deputy Joseph Quinn, the lead officer, claimed to have discovered the pair in flagrante delicto, engaged in anal intercourse. The other three deputies offered differing accounts, none mentioning anal sex (the author’s subsequent interviews turned up still further inconsistencies—as well as retractions).

And so, Carpenter explains, the entire story of one of the most significant civil rights cases of our time comes apart. Charged with violating Texas’s “Homosexual Conduct” law, Lawrence and Tyron immediately protested that they hadn’t once had sex—not on September 17, not ever. No matter: the men soon found themselves swept up in a legal drama of almost Shakespearean dimensions, the unwitting centerpieces of a case predicated on the very unlikely fact of their sexual liaison (and non-existent relationship). ....

...There can be no understanding Lawrence v. Texas without taking stock of the two men themselves. And so, in some of book’s most affecting pages, Carpenter reconstructs the hardscrabble lives of Lawrence and Garner, who no more sought the spotlight than they did careers as gay activists...

...Start with the two men charged with sodomy. When Lawrence, who was born in 1943 to devout white Southern Baptists, was enlisting in the Navy, he quizzed a buddy about the forms he was filling out. “What’s a homosexual?” he wondered. Neither knew the word. Both were gay. After leaving the Navy, Lawrence moved to Houston, worked as a medical technician, and totted up a slew of drunk-driving violations, including a conviction for murder by automobile, in 1967. In the late seventies, he moved into a run-down complex in East Houston populated by underemployed youngsters and strippers who liked to party. Lawrence largely kept his sexual orientation a secret at work, and was anything but a gay-rights activist. Right to the end of the litigation bearing his name, Lawrence’s principal beef was that overzealous policemen had invaded his home without a warrant.

Tyron Garner, the tenth child of black Baptist parents, was twenty-four years younger than Lawrence. He had no car and no fixed address, and supported himself by washing dishes and cleaning houses when he could. Described as “sweet” (despite three previous assault charges) and effeminate, Garner was involved in a stormy relationship with another white man from Houston, Robert Eubanks. And Eubanks, by all accounts, was a mess. Homeless and a heavy drinker, he was the person who called the police on September 17, 1998. Garner and Eubanks lived together wherever they could find an apartment, fighting viciously along the way. Garner and Lawrence, according to Carpenter’s research, were never much more than acquaintances. They weren’t lovers before the case or after.

That night in 1998, Lawrence, Garner, Eubanks, and probably a fourth man were all in Lawrence’s apartment. Lawrence and Eubanks were very drunk. Eubanks seems to have thought that Garner was being flirtatious with Lawrence, and fell into a jealous rage. He left the apartment, supposedly to get some soda, and called the police with a false story about his lover, Garner, brandishing a gun. There was never any dispute that the four policemen who responded to that call were entitled to enter the apartment to investigate, or that Lawrence began screaming furiously at the intruding officers, demanding to see a warrant and threatening to call his lawyer. There was sexually explicit art on the walls, notably a pencil drawing of a naked James Dean with oversized genitals. Eventually, Lawrence and Garner were charged with the crime of “deviate sexual intercourse, namely anal sex, with a member of the same sex (man).”

Some gay-rights attorneys, having been burned a dozen years earlier when, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s homosexual-sodomy law, wanted nothing to do with Lawrence or Garner or the prospect of another legal challenge. Since the days of Brown v. Board of Education, and right up to District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 handgun-ban case, major test cases, they knew, have turned as much on selecting the perfect plaintiffs as on the law being challenged. An interracial, lower-middle-to-lower-class pair hooking up in a seedy apartment in a marginal neighborhood: Lawrence and Garner were hardly a civil-rights litigator’s dream plaintiffs. They were not the type to tug at judicial heartstrings.

But advocates for gay rights couldn’t afford to shop around for a perfect plaintiff. They knew how hard it would be to find a case to challenge the Texas sodomy statute. Since Bowers, no other test case had emerged in which someone was actually arrested for violating a state sodomy law. National gay-rights groups had been challenging state sodomy laws based on supposed harms to gay citizens, who were, litigators claimed, made to look like presumptive criminals. That strategy wasn’t working. After the Supreme Court, in Romer v. Evans (1996), struck down a Colorado initiative excluding gays from anti-discrimination protection, the time felt ripe for another challenge to sodomy statutes. But the gay-civil-rights groups needed to find plaintiffs who would not suffer custody losses or other collateral harms from admitting that they had violated criminal sodomy laws, which tended to rule out gay couples in a committed family relationship. As Carpenter puts it, civil-rights attorneys knew that they needed plaintiffs “with little to lose.” Garner and Lawrence fit that bill.

The two were accidental plaintiffs in more ways than one. Instructively, it was mere happenstance that their arrest even came to the attention of civil-rights advocates in the first place. A closeted gay file clerk saw the arrest report (the charge of sodomy was so rare that it didn’t even have an assigned code) and, gossiping at a local gay watering hole, told the bartender, a man named Lane Lewis. Since Lewis happened to be a gay activist, he recognized the potential importance of the case. It was Lewis who called Lawrence and persuaded him to speak to a gay-civil-rights veteran he had alerted. Each of the legal experts who were subsequently brought into the case knew instantly that it could end up at the high court. The challenge would be in finding a story about love and personal dignity to tell about Lawrence and Garner...

... In order to counter centuries of vague horror, the real Lawrence and Garner had to be concealed behind a tasteful scrim...

The legal opportunity depended, however, upon persuading the defendants to go along with an unusual strategy. High-powered lawyers would represent Lawrence and Garner, as long as they agreed to stop saying they weren’t guilty and instead entered a “no contest” plea. By doing so, the two were promised relative personal privacy, and given a chance to become a part of gay-civil-rights history. The cause was greater than the facts themselves. Lawrence and Garner understood that they were being asked to keep the dirty secret that there was no dirty secret.

That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica...

....Carpenter’s painstaking interviews establish that Garner and Lawrence not only weren’t having sex but were clothed (Lawrence was in his underwear, preparing for bed) and in separate rooms. This makes sense if you consider the timeline that night (Eubanks was ostensibly just slipping out to buy a soda) and the fact that there was yet another man still in the apartment. But the defendants’ accounts were never disclosed to the media. Nor was the existence of Lawrence’s longtime boyfriend, Jose Garcia. Requests by lawyers that the privacy of the two plaintiffs be respected meant that little attention was ever paid to their personal lives. Lawrence and Garner, for their part, were given strict instructions by the lawyers to shun the press. (Carpenter is careful throughout to show that none of the civil-rights lawyers lied or misrepresented the facts.) The litigation strategy, as the case made its way up through the trial courts and appeals courts, was deliberately framed to highlight the need to decriminalize homosexual conduct as a means of recognizing and legitimatizing same-sex “relationships” and “families.” In short, the legal issue was not that free societies must let drunken gay Texans have sex; it was that gay families around the country, in the words of one of the lawyers in the case, “are essentially just like everybody else.”

When it came to the plaintiffs, the legal team had to make the best of what Texas had given them. But there was one piece of casting that was done with painstaking care. Lambda had to pick the right litigator. ...the legal team decided that the plaintiffs would do best before the Supreme Court if they were represented by a litigator who was gay—gay, without “being too gay,” as Carpenter writes. That is, the Lambda lawyers wanted someone whose legal reputation wasn’t tied up with the cause of gay rights. They settled on Paul Smith, a well-respected appellate litigator with very little experience in gay-rights litigation. Well known at the high court, Smith was a Washington insider, who would become the legal face of gay rights where Lawrence and Garner could not. Smith challenged the Texas sodomy statute as a violation both of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws, as enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, and of the liberty and privacy interests protected by the Constitution’s due-process clause. Indeed, as Carpenter tells us, briefs filed in Lawrence were extensively reviewed by former Supreme Court clerks who were themselves gay, with every argument framed to emphasize the “sameness” of same-sex couples. The names Lawrence and Garner were never once mentioned in arguments at the Supreme Court—a mark of the larger strategy’s success....

The point is that Americans were duped by false cases, which came with so much emotional stoking that rational argument was left behind. Americans should have been told that Matthew Shepard was not some innocent martyr of a hate crime, but a meth dealer who was beaten to death by a customer he literally screwed. No hate crime. No panic about gays being murdered wholesale unless hate crimes legislation got passed. Just a seedy story about the horrific effects of meth on a gay dealer and a bisexual customer, both of whom were known in local gay bars.

Americans should have been told that Matthew Shepard was not some innocent martyr of a hate crime, but a meth dealer who was beaten to death by a customer he literally screwed. .

A book like this is to be expected. We can find all sorts of books like this. Figureheads are rarely as clean or noble as we would like our heroes or tragic victims to be. Somehow we manage to weather the character assassinations of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson even if we are less forgiving to Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks.

Originally Posted by Elspeth

No hate crime.

The primary issue in the Matthew Shepard case was to see that the killer was prosecuted and to set a national example. The "homosexual panic defense" had been successfully used for a long time to get the killers of gay people (mostly men) off the hook. It was time to put a stop to that. It was time to see a crime punished properly. Since it's not of interest to you, your ears probably don't perk up every time a gay person gets killed and a killer gets off with little or no punishment. It matters to us.

Hate crimes laws are misdirected. I don't give a rat's patoot about hate crimes laws, I'd be happy simply to see the law equally applied. If you spent your time trying to prove yourself wrong rather than simply looking for support for your positions then you would be more aware of the body of crimes and punishment at the core of the issue.

A book like this is to be expected. We can find all sorts of books like this. Figureheads are rarely as clean or noble as we would like our heroes or tragic victims to be. Somehow we manage to weather the character assassinations of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson even if we are less forgiving to Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks.

The primary issue in the Matthew Shepard case was to see that the killer was prosecuted and to set a national example. The "homosexual panic defense" had been successfully used for a long time to get the killers of gay people (mostly men) off the hook. It was time to put a stop to that. It was time to see a crime punished properly. Since it's not of interest to you, your ears probably don't perk up every time a gay person gets killed and a killer gets off with little or no punishment. It matters to us.

Hate crimes laws are misdirected. I don't give a rat's patoot about hate crimes laws, I'd be happy simply to see the law equally applied. If you spent your time trying to prove yourself wrong rather than simply looking for support for your positions then you would be more aware of the body of crimes and punishment at the core of the issue.

Good response.

Incidentally, MLK was not perfect and there have been many attacks on him, some justified (he cheated on his wife).

I saw somebody post somewhere a thing about how Rosa Parks was involved in a civil rights group prior to the bus incident that led to her arrest, as if that somehow taints her story of being too tired after working all day to give up her bus seat to some crackers.

If Matthew Shepard had been a gay activist and was found later to be a meth user as well, then you might have a logical point.

But Matthew Shepard was a nothing but a meth dealer. He was not an activist, not an innocent victim, and certainly not a victim of the straight community. His killer was a bisexual man who spent lots of time in gay bars. Shepard was a victim of his own community and his own drug dealing.

Incidentally, MLK was not perfect and there have been many attacks on him, some justified (he cheated on his wife).

I saw somebody post somewhere a thing about how Rosa Parks was involved in a civil rights group prior to the bus incident that led to her arrest, as if that somehow taints her story of being too tired after working all day to give up her bus seat to some crackers.

Nothing new about any of this. Rosa Parks was a local leader of the NAACP in Alabama. Her taking the seat at the front of the bus was a calculated act; the NAACP had been looking for a way to make a stand on the bus issue.

The American public may not have known that Parks was an activist, but the rest of the situation was genuine: Parks WAS black, she lived in a state that DID discriminate on public buses (and everywhere else), and she DID take a real risk in taking a seat where she did. All that was real.

Matthew Shepard's story, on the other hand, is a compete fake from beginning to end. He was not killed for being gay, but as a result of the drug trade he was in. He was not killed by a paranoid straight homophobe but by a drug-addicted bisexual partner looking for a fix. The anti-gay defense of the killer could have been dissolved completely if his bisexuality, frequenting of gay bars, and his sexual background with Shepard had been brought to light.

There was NOTHING genuine about the Matthew Shepard case. There is no way to even compare a cheap, small-time meth dealer who had sex with his male customers to Rosa Parks or MLK.

Incidentally, MLK was not perfect and there have been many attacks on him, some justified (he cheated on his wife).

I saw somebody post somewhere a thing about how Rosa Parks was involved in a civil rights group prior to the bus incident that led to her arrest, as if that somehow taints her story of being too tired after working all day to give up her bus seat to some crackers.